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Welcome back to another episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, this is episode 39. Today I’m going to be teaching you all about a system of breeding and keeping a genetically diverse flock of chickens for years independent of outside genetics. What that means is that you will be able to keep breeding and improving your flock for years without worrying about inbreeding problems.

I learned about this method as I’ve learned a lot of chicken care tidbits from Harvey Ussery. But rather than explain it the exact same way as he has. I’ll try to put it in my own words and show you what I mean by explaining what I’ll be doing with my new flock of Black Copper Marans.

Proper Care of Your Flock Genetics

One of the foundational elements to a sustainable and profitable homestead is going to be animals kept well, and bred well for years to become healthier and better adapted to your location. We do that with our vegetables by saving seed year after year from the best, healthiest, and most productive plants we have. Likewise we should be doing the same with our livestock. Now, the way most people keep their birds is to have a single or maybe two roosters, and they allow a hen or two to hatch a clutch of eggs every spring, or they set some in an incubator and raise them up. But that’s neither a responsible way to breed your birds nor will it be likely to produce long term benefits.

The problem with that method is that you will be breeding father to daughter, or siblings, this is kind of like line breeding but more haphazard and while sometimes it will produce an exceptional animal like in line breeding, for the most part you will be degrading your flock quality. It is by no means a long term solution. You will start to see mutations and genetic abnormalities show up, deformed chicks will be born more often. The short story is that you will after a couple years be forced to acquire “new blood” to keep the flock strong. So if you want a truly self sufficient, or well maintained flock, you should be breeding with purpose and care should be taken.

That means being careful with who gets bred to whom and what birds are allowed to pass on their genes to the next generation. I’ve even heard of some rare breeds being saved with a single trio of breeders, and new selections being made every year to preserve the very best genes to pass on to the next generation. You may have 20 birds, but you won’t be saving eggs from all 20. You’ll save eggs from the best two hens out of 20. Generally you are shooting to breed the top 10% of your available hens and the absolutely best roosters.

Practical Application

Just because you may have a lot of inferior birds in the flock doesn’t mean you can’t continue to improve the flock, you just need several small holding pens to keep the special breeders separate so you can ensure you have specific pairings.

I’ll have 2 or 3 smaller runs with shelter, a feeder, and a water source for the breeding birds. I’ll leave the selected rooster and whatever hens I decide to breed with him, and do the same for as many good roosters I have. I may have lots of other birds who have off traits that I don’t want to breed in my flock lines. That’s fine, I just don’t hatch eggs from those hens! We eat those eggs, or sell them (not as hatching eggs) Those birds that aren’t going into our breeding program get mixed in with the general egg laying flock. This will also enable me to keep the most valuable breeding stock more secure behind higher security fencing. So my hope is that if anything gets in to kill any of my flock, I’ll at least have good breeding stock secure in a fort knox chicken pen or chicken tractor. I am seriously considering building 3 chicken tractors to keep my special breeding stock in and making it out of hardware cloth so nothing can break in, not even snakes would be able to get in to steal eggs and not even weasels would kill my birds in there. That way they could get some good sunshine, fresh grass and bugs every day and be highly secured in their enclosure.

So what this means is I’ll have my best 2 hens with the best rooster, and another 2 great hens with another rooster, and I’ll switch the best rooster out every year with the next generation’s best to keep improving. So practically speaking if I have a hatch of 60 chicks, assuming they all survive, there should only be about 6 new breeders in that batch! But that means assuming a 50/50 split between roosters and hens, that’s only 3 new breeder hens! So I’d have a bunch of hens and especially a lot of roosters that aren’t going to contribute to next year’s flock genetics. What do I do with all those roosters? We eat em! We grow them in chicken tractors or a large pen for 3 months and then butcher! I have a feeling we’re going to be eating a lot of chicken this next year! The other hens just lay eggs for us to eat, and to feed our other animals. My dog will eat the eggs and we can sell eggs to local market. Black Copper Maran eggs should fetch a premium price compared to normal brown eggs. So remember that the breeding plan is not to have a large flock of breeding stock, the plan is to select the best of the best to hatch eggs from. If you don’t do this, you’re just gambling!

The Breeding Plan

I’ll be utilizing a combination of Line Breeding and Clan Breeding systems. To start out I’ll be selecting my best rooster and the best 4 hens out of 22 hens. Those are the birds I’ll hatch eggs from and build my flock from. In a year or two I’ll import a couple roosters from a different family line and use them to improve my flock and start Clan Breeding. But to start with I’ll be line breeding to eliminate undesirable traits and refine the best traits while culling the worst. I’ll specifically separate out the best hens and see if they are laying consistent dark eggs, if one of them isn’t, I’ll further separate them to identify the light egg laying hen and eliminate her from my breeding program. That’s first and foremost in my selection process and the highest priority, dark eggs! Then I’ll be selecting for as many specific traits as I can find in each hen. I don’t expect to find many hens that conform to all the traits I’m looking for at first, but as time goes by, with each new generation I should be able to get things dialed in to having some stellar breed standard conforming Black Copper Marans. I really do want to be one of the best places to get this breed of chicken from in the future. I can see us having a chicken dominant landscape here in Saline. I just like the animal, for the most part they’re just easy to deal with!

Clan Breeding

So you’ve heard me using this term several times and are probably yelling “Get on with it! Tell us what this clan breeding is and how it works!” Well here we go!

Clan breeding is a system of organizing your breeding lines so as to reduce the number of close familial crossings as possible. I’ll break it down as simple as I can. Let’s say you have 3 clans of chickens. (and that’s really the lowest number of clans you want to have.) Let’s call them Blue, Green, and Yellow. So let’s say we have 3 excellent roosters that are really the best of the best. That’s easy to come up with when you have so many to choose from and so few needed. Then we have let’s say 3 hens in each clan. We put leg bands on all the birds, each clan is given it’s own color of course. Now we can put all these birds together in a group with no problems because we know who is who by their leg bands. I’ll be buying my bands from Stromberg’s and trying the plastic numbered bandettes to see how they work. I may go to the removable aluminum bands though. If I got the aluminum ones, they could be reused for years on successive generations. All you’d have to do is paint the bands as the paint wore off with use. But to start out with, I’ll just order 3 colors of bands and go with those for now. It’ll only be $28 for 3 different colors, and 25 bands per color so that’s not too bad

So we’ve got our clans picked out, 1 rooster per clan, and each clan should have no more than 12 hens. That’s about as many hens as a single rooster can service. So each clan in our example is a couple hens and a rooster. When it comes time to start collecting eggs, you just separate each clan into a run or pen by themselves and leave them for 2 weeks. The reason you want to separate them for 2 weeks is both to let the hens adjust to the stress of being separated, but also to eliminate any sperm that was retained by other roosters. A hen will lay fertilized eggs for about 2 weeks after being bred. So by separating them, we ensure that the only eggs being laid were fertilized by the rooster we chose. Now you just collect those eggs for about a week, putting the eggs they lay every day into cartons on the counter with the pointy end down. And I just rotate the eggs daily by standing the egg carton on its right side, then back flat, then on it’s left side, then back flat, but not turning it upside down. That keeps the yolk from sticking to the eggshell. If it sticks to the side then it can harm the developing chick.

You’ll want to mark your cartons to be sure you don’t mix up the clans, and were I you, I’d set eggs at least a week apart to make it easier to keep the chicks separated. I imagine you won’t have multiple incubators, so starting your batches at least a week apart allows you to hatch them in individual batches over the course of a month. Then brood your chicks as you see fit and raise them up, releasing them either after banding them into the larger flock, or releasing them into separate clan pens. Some people will set up a pen for each clan and keep their clans separated all the time, but I don’t have the space or infrastructure for that yet so I’ll just be keeping them in one large flock. If you do that, just make sure you have them banded so you don’t get your birds mixed up! The chicks from Blue clan hens are always marked as Blue clan, Green stays green, Yellow, you get the picture. Chicks always stay with the mother’s clan.

That’s generation 1!

For the next generation, we want to pick the best young rooster from each clan and get rid of all the rest of the roosters. The rooster from Blue clan will not breed any hens from Blue clan, it will breed hens from Green clan, and the Green clan rooster will breed Yellow hens, and of course Yellow rooster will breed Blue clan hens.

As long as every breeding, the rooster from your clan only breeds the next clan over, you should have no problems with brothers and sisters breeding.

2 Simple Rules

1. Chicks always remain in the Clan of their mother, that means roosters and hens.
2. Roosters always breed the next clan over, never deviating from that! (That means Blue never breeds Blue. And if you start out having Blue breed to Green, that means every time you breed, Blue clan will always breed into Green clan, Green to Yellow, and Yellow to Blue.)This is what the eggs look like. Tell me they aren’t amazing!! Photo courtesy of Rockridge Farms

Things to Not Worry About

If you keep a large group flock (and I imagine most people will) you will see a Blue rooster breeding all sorts of hens including Blue and Yellow and Green. That’s ok if they all interbreed because you aren’t hatching those eggs. The only time you hatch eggs is when they have been separated for 2 weeks with the correct rooster to ensure the proper clan mating to keep your breeding program healthy.

Don’t worry if a hen goes broody and wants to hatch a batch of chicks. If you want broody characteristics then put an extra band on her to mark her as prime breeding stock, allow her to hatch the clutch, band those juveniles as culls and either sell them as chicks, or raise them up to laying age and sell for more money but do not include them in your breeding program.

Pro Tips

• Keep 2 roosters from each clan to ensure you have a replacement male in the event something happens to one of them. The drawback to that is having at least 6 roosters at all times, yikes! But the benefit is that if one gets sick or injured or worse yet an unexpected predator loss takes one out, you will have a backup roo.
• Don’t wash the eggs before setting or incubating them.
• Store eggs with the pointed side down, the more rounded end of the egg has an air pocket in it. Keeping the air pocket at the top helps to keep the yolk central inside the egg and prevents the air pocket from rupturing. This keeps the egg viable for longer.
• If you are letting a hen go broody, mark the eggs with a sharpie all around the egg in a ring. I do this just in case another hen comes by to lay eggs in the nest, you can tell which ones are being incubated beneath the hen and which ones are fresh. Try to keep around 6-8 eggs under a hen, too many and they will get too cold and not hatch.
• Chicks hatch optimally at 21 days
• If a chick is struggling to hatch, don’t help it, you can hurt it badly, if it cannot manage to get out of the shell then it’s a weak bird and you don’t want it to grow up to reproduce because it will be more likely to be sickly and weak.
• If you’re incubating chicks, let them stay in the incubator for 12-24 hours and get nice and dry and fluffy before moving them to a brooder. They will be just fine. I never move chicks that aren’t fluffed up and walking around pecking at things.

Other Thoughts

There’s a lot to be said about selecting the best breeding stock, and even more about the individual breeds but I’ll leave that for another day. Each breed will have it’s own standard but who knows, you may not care about particular breed standards, so if you don’t then just start your own mixed breed flock and start selecting for traits that you really like. You might not care what the coloration or pattern is, you might be selecting for a particular characteristic like comb shape, or tail feather length, or weight. Lots of different options really, there is almost no end of the possibilities for breeding these creatures. However, if your aim is to sell birds in the future, I would either specialize in a particularly useful trait, or breed. Most people will be looking for a particular type of chicken and it might be in your best interest to specialize in that type of breed.

If you don’t have the space to keep that many flocks, then it’s entirely possible to find two friends or neighbors who also want to keep the same type of bird and every breeding season you swap roosters. Always saving the best couple roosters to pass on to your neighbor. Let’s say you have 2 friends, one is Joe Smith, and the other is Jane Doe. Every year you save the best two roosters from your breeding efforts to give to Joe, he does the same and gives his best two roosters to Jane, and she gives her best two roosters to you! Now you have each maintained a clan and you don’t have to do anything but manage a single flock of birds. The downside to this is that your neighbor might be unreliable or :might not be as fastidious with their birds and introduce a disease to your flock. But on the other hand, you would be building relationships and working together towards a common goal. It’s something to think about at least.

So let’s kind of recap this thing. Line breeding is the practice of breeding related birds together to accentuate gene expression. Clan breeding is a method of maintaining a very diverse gene pool and eliminating close relational breeding which enables us to maintain a healthy gene pool for longer periods of time. Both types of breeding methods have strengths and weaknesses and using them in tandem will help you to achieve optimal results. Clan mating systems with 7 clans are projected to ensure a healthy and stable gene pool for over a century. So when we’re thinking of long term stability and resilience, think about how to ensure our livestock are constantly improved and kept healthy. This same type of breeding system works very well with rabbits as well as chickens, the same principles apply no matter what animal you are breeding.

I hope this was interesting and educational for you guys, I know it can sometimes be hard to describe what I am imagining in my head, so if you’re one of those people who really needs to see an illustration or example for it to really make sense, I hope the infographic I specially made for this episode helped you picture what I was talking about!

One last thing before I sign off here, remember the Redeeming the Dirt conference is set for next week!

I’ll be there teaching about homesteading and plant propagation. The big names there will be Brian Oldrives and Joel Salatin! So I want you all to be there if you can! If you register, please use the discount code we set up for all my listeners! HL15 for a 15% discount on your ticket!

The event details are:

October 7th-8th, 2016 at Meadowbrook Baptist Church in Gadsden, Alabama.

All conference admission fees include lunch and supper on Friday and Saturday!

Registration Pricing:

$120: Adult Price ($102 with discount code HL15)

$55: Child (12 and under, babies free)

The link to register is here:

https://redeemingthedirt.regfox.com/redeeming-the-dirt-conference

Also I’ll be around the DFW area the last week of October teaching at the TSP Homestead Skills workshop so let me know if you wanted to have me do any on site consulting for you while I’m in the area, the cost goes way down when I’m already near your location.    

Alright guys, that wraps things up, I hope you enjoyed this topic, if you want to follow up on this or ask questions, please hop on facebook and join the discussion in the community group, lots of great ideas and encouragement get shared there every day!

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”